Understanding Octavia E. Butler will offer "New insights into the work of an acclaimed science fiction author." Coming April 2025 from the University of South Carolina Press. Learn more:
https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Octavia-E-Butler |
She Bites Back critically situates the figure of the black female vampire in several fields of study including literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical race studies. Black female vampires continue to appear as important literary devices and revealing indicators of cultural attitudes and trends about African American women’s bodies. This book examines five novels written by four African American women writers to investigate what it means to represent African American womanhood through the lens of vampirism, interrogate how these representations connect to or stem from historical representations of African American women, and explore how representations of black female vampires in African American women’s literature simultaneously negate, reinforce, or dismantle stereotypes of African American women. Get the Book.
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The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler brings together essays from leading and emerging scholars. These essays cover Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short stories and major novel sequences Patternmaster, Xenogenesis and The Parables. To date, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E. Butler is the most comprehensive companion to Butler scholarship available.
The companion features a foreword from Sandra Y. Govan, an essay from Steven Barnes, and an afterword by Tananarive Due. Get the book. |
- “‘...reveling in that freedom’: Roxane Gay’s Hunger as 21st-Century Freedom Narrative.” South Atlantic Review, Spring 2022, vol. 87, no. 1, pp. 19-38.
- “As the World Burns: ‘Checking In’ (An Annotated Letter to My Students with Lessons from Octavia E. Butler).”For Us, To Us, About Us: Racial Unrest and Cultural Transformation, a special issue of College Language Association Journal, edited by Dana A. Williams and Kendra R. Parker, vol. 63, no. 2, September 2020, pp. 162-167.
- “Octavia Butler and Afrofuturism.” 20th and 21st Century American Literature, edited by Mary Pat Brady, Gale Researcher, 2016.
- “Introduction.” Decolonizing the University: A Battle for the African Mind,” CLA Journal, edited by Kendra R. Parker, vol. 60, no. 2, 2016, pp. 164-171.
- “Unchaining Selves: Contemporary Slavery and Health Care Freedom in Tananarive Due’s Blood Colony.” CLA Journal, vol. 59, no. 2, 2015, pp. 145-165.
- "Sink Your Teeth Into It! Black Vampires in an Asynchronous Literature Classroom." In Teaching With Vampires, edited by U. Melissa Anyiwo. Palgrave MacMillan, 2025, pp. 29-49.
- “Flipping the Script? Queering the Insider/Outsider Status of the Black Vampire Queen in Richard Wenk’s Vamp (1986).” In Queering the Vampire Narrative, edited by Amanda Jo Hobson and U. Melissa Aniywo, Brill, 2024, pp. 30-45.
- “'I’m not the vampire he is; I give in return for my taking': Tracing Vampirism in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Octavia E. Butler, edited by Kendra R. Parker and Gregory Jerome Hampton, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 73-94.
- “Vampire in Brooklyn: A Passing Narrative.” In The Global Vampire: Essays on the Undead in Popular Culture Around the World, edited by Cait Coker. McFarland, 2020, pp. 35-47.
- “Noble Savages, Magical Negroes, and Exotic Others, Oh My! Black Female Vampires in Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2.” All Around Monstrous: Monster Media in Their Historical Contexts, edited by Frank Jacob and Verena Bernardi, Vernon Press, 2019, pp. 161-186.
- “Intergroup Dialogue and Difficult Conversations: Teaching Butler at a Private, Christian, Predominantly White Institution.” Approaches to Teaching the Works of Octavia E. Butler, edited by Tarshia L. Stanley. The Modern Language Association of America, pp. 107-116.
- Review of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction by Jerry Rafiki Jenkins. Studies in the Novel, vol. 52, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 96-98
- “Soucouyants, Ol’Hige, and Lougarou, Oh My!: Shedding Skin, Breaching Boundaries, and Creating Change.” Review of The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora by Giselle Liza Anatol. In PLL, vol. 54, no. 3, 2018, pp. 296-301.
- Review of Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires by Gregory Jerome Hampton, in Callaloo, vol. 35, no. 2, 2012, pp. 536-537.